


lima syndrome

by thevoiceoflightcity



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Long Time Period, Unreliable Narrator, and how close he is to breaking, it's just that she really doesn't know what he's been through, this is not a happy fic, villain perspective, well sort of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-06
Updated: 2016-06-06
Packaged: 2018-07-12 17:59:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,792
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7116712
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thevoiceoflightcity/pseuds/thevoiceoflightcity
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tentoo gets captured and locked up by the Pete's World Time Agency. Maybe. It's ninety percent Tentoo and a lady called Vivian talking. This is far more screwed up than it sounds. Everyone's mental health goes absolutely to hell very fast.</p>
            </blockquote>





	lima syndrome

**Author's Note:**

> This is not a happy story - no real explicit violence, but I did scare myself into insomnia writing it, and it does end really badly. Just so you know.  
> Also - English is not my first language, so please tell me if I've made any strange blunders, or added American English where it shouldn't be. Thanks. Oh god I'm scared. Here you go.

They finally caught the xeno behind his favorite coffee shop.

They’d been watching him for years, of course – cataloguing habits, vulnerabilities, the way he moved and the way he talked and what that gave away about the alien under his skin. They watched the Torchwood operatives that guarded him, and watched how he slipped away from them sometimes, to be alone. They took note of the tricks he used and the lies he told and they prepared.

They didn’t bother with knockout darts or sedatives – they couldn’t afford to accidentally give him an overdose. Instead, they just sent several men in black suits to hit him over the head. Old-fashioned but effective. He had time to turn around, narrow green eyes, say “What are y-“

He went out like a light.

They dragged him to the van, but they did it carefully. He was, after all, one of a kind.

_=limasyndrome=_

Two days later, she is informed that the Agency’s new ‘consultant’ is about to wake up, by way of a notification on her wristcomp. His vital signs flare in the corner of the display: breathing normal, heartbeat slightly off-beat but steady. (Later, she’ll figure out why his heartbeat stutters; it’s one of two, and the syncopated half-rhythm still remembers it, though it’s alone now.)

She heads for the elevator.

This is the Room: white walls made of foot-thick alien steel, wrapped in a Faraday cage and the most advanced signal blockers (both telepathic and electromagnetic) they could find. Eleven foot by eleven, filtered oxygen, one air-lock door. A bed in the far corner, bathroom facilities, a shelf with a couple of books, a table and a chair, no windows. Fifteen pinhole cameras scattered around the room. Fifty feet underground, behind as many layers of security as they can manage; fingerprints and DNA-test and voice-recognition and guards with guns and black eyes. She’s the only person allowed through, the only person who can walk through those final doors. Maybe it’s overkill.

Better safe than sorry.

She steps through the last door on sharp black high heels and waits for the airlock to cycle.

Yesterday, they welded the shock collar around his neck. It’s thin, not very heavy, a bright-sharp yellow. It’ll monitor his breathing, his heartbeat, track his movements and his sleep patterns, deliver an electric shock on her command. Made of the strongest metal they could find, ripped out of an alien warship, and he’s not going to be breaking it anytime soon.

He’s curled up on the bed, still unconscious, the shock collar glaring yellow around his neck. They let him keep his own clothes, for now – blue pinstriped suit, coat, white converse shoes. A thin silver chain made from the same supposedly unbreakable metal as the collar cuffs his left hand to the wall by the bedpost – it’s not a very long chain, but links will be added or taken away as needed. She’s memorized exactly how far it reaches, knows where it’s safe to stand and where he could reach her, if he wanted to. She’s trained for this, and though a good portion of it has been mind-wiped out of her, it stays in her instincts. She has read every piece of info they have on him; she has studied interrogation techniques, alien psychology, trying to get a handle on the not-person.

And now he’s in front of her, the half-alien from another universe, Torchwood's champion, the last remnant of something older and stranger than any human could imagine. Helpless. Defenseless. He looks almost peaceful when he’s sleeping, she thinks quietly, like he isn’t the most dangerous weapon in the universe.

And then she lifts her high-heeled foot and gives him a vicious kick in the side.

He jumps awake, scrambling upright, chain tangling in flailing limbs, and halfway up he reaches the end of its short length, pulling him off the bed entirely with a painful jerk. His eyes snap open, and for a moment there's something inhuman behind them, something like grief and rage and the lightning-razor smell of the oncoming storm. 

She kicks him again, brutal and short, all business.

He recoils, the ancient thing in his eyes slipping shut, manages to get himself sitting mostly upright, breathing hard. His eyes dart around the Room, visibly struggling to get the fog out of his head, analyzing, trying to make sense of the situation.

"Rose-," he gasps, takes a breath. "What have you done with Rose?"

"She's perfectly fine and safer than she was when you were with her. Cooperate, and she'll stay that way." 

He focuses on her, eyes narrowing. Takes in the chain, the wristcomp on her neck. Analyzes.

Slowly, he extracts himself from the chain, wrapping it around the bedpost, maneuvering himself into standing up. He does not take his green-sharp eyes off her.

"So that's how it is."

"That's how it is," she replied, prim and perfect as always.

"What do you want?” he asks, calm now, standing straight, getting right to the point.

"You're with the Agency. We will tell you what we want when we want it. For now, you will do everything I say. You will have no contact with anyone else but me. Three times a day, I will bring you food. You will not attempt to touch me; we are well aware of your telepathic abilities. I have been mind-wiped, I know nothing that will help you. If you do not follow our rules, you will be punished. If you are caught or suspected of trying to escape in any way, you will be punished. Do you understand?"

He does not move, staring her down. 

"Answer me or you will be punished."

"I understand," he says, slowly, with a mocking smirk. He doesn’t, not really. He thinks they’re a terrorist organization or some xenophobe idiots. Things he’s dealt with before, things he’s survived and ground into dust. He’ll understand soon. She’ll make him understand.

"You see this?" She holds up a small metal thing like a key fob with one button in it, deliberately positioning it so he has to stretch the limits of the chain to get a good look at it. He cranes his neck, frowns a little. “Do you want to know what this is?”

“Sure.” He’s watching her carefully, not paying attention to the device.

"This is the shock-collar control,” she says. “Here is a demonstration."

His eyes widen, hands going up to his neck. Recognition. "No-"

And then she presses the button.

There is no crackle, no arcing electricity: the shock is practically silent, just a hissing electric snap, a smell like hot metal. And then the xeno screams.

The scream is high and alien and it does not stop, moving on far past human lung capacity, a thin and broken sound that goes on and on and _on_

\- and then with another hissing snap it cuts off, the scream dissolving into ragged desperate breaths. He drags himself off the floor, on all fours, head hanging down. He does not look at her.

"Do you understand?" she asks, calm as calm can be. She does not remember much of her life at the Agency, but both the statistics and the evidence she's found herself argue that she's seen worse. 

And besides, he's a xeno. As long as she doesn't kill him, no one cares.

"Do you understand?" she says again, sharper.

He hisses it through clenched teeth, looking up at her through the fringe of his wild brown hair. "I understand."

"The collar also has a lethal setting. You are valuable to us, but not that valuable. Do you understand?"

"You'd be surprised at what I can survive," he murmurs.

"Look at me." He doesn't react. She bends down, snarls it close to his face. "Look. At. Me." 

He raises his head sullenly, green eyes sparking. 

"We know very well of your abilities, half-Time Lord. You would not survive the lethal charge. You will call me Vivian, and no other name. Do you understand?"

"I'm the Doctor."

"Not anymore,” she tells him, ice-sliver-sharp. “You will answer to whatever I call you, do you understand me, halfling?"

He says it reluctantly, doesn’t mean it, but he says it:

"I understand."

_=limasyndrome=_

When she comes in with the tray, he's leaning back on the bed. Dinner, today, is just a sandwich. It's not a bad sandwich. It's not even drugged. He'll eat it, if he's smart, and according to the records he’s smarter than anything else on the planet. He's taken his shoes off, brightly colored socks on his feet. They irritate her, for no reason she can fathom.

"Evening," he says when she comes in. "Are you going to tell me what you want now?"

She sets the sandwich down on the table. He eyes it pointedly. "I'm not going to be able to reach that with the chain.”

"Use the lockpicks in your pockets," she says. "You're perfectly capable."

"You said I shouldn't make any attempt to escape," he points out, waving his hands in the air above the bed.

“This is how it works,” she explains, cool and cold. “The more you cooperate, the more freedom we grant you. Right now, you are allowed to unchain yourself. This may change at any time, without warning or reason. If you’re very, very good, I might give you a television. Maybe even internet access. But you are not leaving this vault. From now on, everything in your life is under my control. You are an alien on planet earth in the twenty-first century – you have no power and no rights.”

“You haven’t even told me what I’m supposed to cooperate _with._ ”

“You do what I tell you to. That’s all you need to know,” she says, and leaves.

_=limasyndrome=_

It takes him half an hour to get the locks open. He’s good – the locks were expensive, supposedly unpickable. He checks the perimeter of the Room first, inspecting every corner, pulling shelves out, crawling under the bed. He takes each of the three books, flips through the pages in a smooth whirring motion, and puts it back on the shelf. He doesn’t seem to find anything, but it’s hard to tell – his face gives nothing away.

The first thing he does, though, is move once around, giving each of the fifteen pinhole cameras a light tap and a strange smile. The message is clear – _I know you’re there. I know you’re watching._

The lights shut off at ten o’clock. He doesn’t jump, just goes rigid for a frozen instant, and then relaxes in the infrared light of the cameras. She wonders if he can see into the infrared spectrum, or if he’s simply memorized the layout of the Room – he’s having no problems, despite the absolute cave-darkness in the vault, no streetlights or stars to see by.

Night. He doesn’t sleep.

_=limasyndrome=_

Breakfast is served at eight. She walks in with the tray in one hand and the silver control unit held high in the other, and despite all he does to hide it, he cringes ever so slightly at the sight of it.

“Stay back,” she says, loud and clear. “This is how it works, from now until I decide otherwise: you may unchain yourself whenever you want, but when I knock at the door, you reattach the chain before I come in. Do you understand?”

“Clear as glass,” he says, sitting on the bed, grinning at her mockingly.

“Do it now. If I catch or suspect you of not attaching the chain perfectly, you will be punished.”

He stays on the bed. _“Now.”_

Grudgingly, he takes the cuff, snaps it shut around his hand. He does it slowly, methodically, not taking his knife-bright eyes off her. They are human eyes, she realizes - she hadn’t expected that; she knows he’s a hybrid, an unnatural, alien, thing, but despite the infinite darkness behind them they are very, very human.

“Is Rose really safe? Is she at home?”

And _there_ , a flicker of vulnerability – he cares about the girl, this halfling, Frankenstein’s Monster. She’ll make use of that, someday.

“For now.”

She leaves the breakfast on the table and goes.

Lunch is the same routine, though he chains himself up when she knocks this time. Dinner is more of the same. He asks the same questions, banters, and she gives him no answers.

_=limasyndrome=_

Three days later, he dawdles while putting the chains back on. She shocks him when she comes in, and watches him scream. She does not make empty threats.

He’s faster after that.

_=limasyndrome=_

A week after he arrives, things change.

She knocks in the middle of the simulated night. He is not sleeping – he sleeps only about once every three days, in cat-naps a few hours long – and he jumps up in the darkness, reaching for the chain, well-trained already.

She walks in through the absolute black, head held high. She can’t see a thing, but she does not let her breathing quicken, though her heartbeat speeds up slightly and she wishes she knew if he could hear it.

She snaps her fingers, and the lights flicker on, on command. He’s sitting on the floor next to the bed, hand still on the cuff lock, staring at her with something like confusion in his eyes.

“A bit late, isn’t it?” he says, still staring at her.

“You do not speak unless I ask you a question. Do you understand?”

Definitely confusion. “What happen-“

She holds up the control unit. He snaps silent.

“You will answer my questions completely and truthfully, twisting nothing and holding nothing back. We have files on you and your kind; if we catch you lying, you will be punished.”

Something flickers in eyes again – something deeper than the human part of him, something she can’t identify, and she hates him for it. “I understand.”

“You come from a parallel universe, correct?”

He hesitates.

“Answer the question.”

“…Yes.”

“In that parallel universe there exists a Time Lord called the Doctor, correct?”

“Yes.”

“This Time Lord traveled with Rose Tyler, but she came to our universe right before the world-walls closed. Later, however, Torchwood figured out a way for her to go back, so she and the Doctor were united again, correct?”

“Yes.”

“At which point you were created – a meld between the Doctor and a human, with all of his memories but biology far closer to human. The original Doctor then sent you and Rose Tyler back to this universe, where you have stayed since.”

“…Yes.”

“All of his memories?”

“My brain is –“ He hesitates again, but continues, eyes dark. “My brain is entirely Time Lord. I remember everything I did up until I got cloned off.”

“How did this happen?”

“It’s – complicated. I grew out of a hand.” He says it half-sheepishly, half-fearfully, like he thinks she won’t believe him. That’s good. Fear is good. “There was a – woman, called Donna Noble. She got some of my – his – memories. I got some of her biology. Instantaneous biological metacrisis.”

“Why did the Doctor send you away?”

“There isn’t space for two of me in one universe. He was the original, he kept the TARDIS. And besides, Rose needed me.”

“Don’t lie to me,” she snarls. “I can tell when you lie to me.”

He looks away. “The… there was never supposed to be a Time Lord-human metacrisis. For a reason.” He swallows. “I’d really rather you don’t-“

“Explain.” Silence. _“Explain.”_

He looks back at her, and his green eyes are suddenly ancient again, staring out of a young face. “Donna Noble is , _dead_.” he snarls back, all pain and guilt and razor-edges. “Is that what you wanted to hear? We’re unstable, both of us. Time Lord and human are fundamentally incompatible. She was entirely human. I’m the real hybrid – she just got the feedback, and my – his – our memories, our mind, will have fried her brain.” He goes silent. “We both knew it, both of me, but neither of us were willing to accept it. She must have known it too, even if she wouldn’t let it show… I don’t know. Maybe she survived a week. A year. A human life. Maybe she burned up five minutes after the world-walls closed.” Then his eyes snap back to her. “Why are you asking this? Why do you want to know? Why am I _here?”_

“You just said it yourself,” she tells him. “You’re unstable. You’re _dangerous._ ” And by the way his eyes widen, go young and hurt again, she can tell he believes it.

_=limasyndrome=_

The next night she comes again. There’s no confusion in his eyes this time, just sullen anger.

“You have, or had, time-travel technology, correct?”

“A TARDIS,” he says. “The best thing you humans come up with is vortex manipulators. Ridiculous way to time-travel, absolutely pathetic.”

“Elaborate.”

“A time-and-space ship. Travel anywhere and anywhen in the universe. Sentient, smart, telepathic in their own right. And she was _beautiful,”_ he hums, eyes off in the distance.

“A Tardis?”

“Time and Relative Dimensions in Space,” he tells her. “My granddaughter made that up from the sounds. It meant something else in Gallifreyan.” He sees her shock at _granddaughter,_ smiles an awful smile. “There are things you don’t know about me, Vivian. Things you’ll never know.”

_=limasyndrome=_

“Isn’t this just lovely. Another middle-of-the-night chat. Mind you, would be a lot more lovely if I wasn’t chained up.”

“Who are the Time Lords?”

He tries to hide it, but the words hit somewhere deep and she can tell. Which was it? He wasn’t uncomfortable talking about his own Time Lordliness, or lack thereof – what has she just given away? He sees her calculating, of course. He’s getting to know her too well, in these few weeks – she needs to train herself calmer, colder, stop giving him information. She tries again: “Who are the Time Lords?”

His voice goes soft. “Were.”

“What?”

“Who _were_ the Time Lords.” He smiles another awful not-smile at her. “You had no idea, did you? You thought Time Lords just don’t exist in this universe, and that’s the only reason you haven’t ever heard of them.”

She does not respond, wavering on the cliffs-edge - teeth-clenched hope that he’ll tell her, that she’ll keep going, that she won’t have to reveal what she knows by asking more questions -

“You’re half right. There never were Time Lords in this universe – we kept the number of alternate Gallifreys down. Didn’t like the competition, I suppose. But even if there were – they’re all gone.”

How does he _do_ that, with his eyes? It’s ridiculous, the way he can suddenly go completely and entirely alien, ancient and incomprehensible, without warning. And still she can’t identify _why._

“Why are they gone?”

“Gallifrey was beautiful, you know.” He ignores her, keeps talking. “Orange sky over silver trees, the glass walls of the Citadel, Arcadia and Petra and Luxor.” He says the unfamiliar words like poems or incantations, with a lilting, rolling accent she can’t identify. “The Time Lords were a bunch of stuffy old hats, bad fashion sense, and none of them ever saw the universe properly, but it was beautiful, cities as old as time.” He’s looking right through her, talking almost to himself. “And the machines – no race ever had the level of time-sensitivity we did, Vivian. People keep thinking it’s one extra sense, but it wasn’t; we saw time, heard time, tasted and smelled and felt time. We spun it like lace, poured it like water, made it dance in beautiful patterns nobody else was even capable of seeing. We had de-mat loops and time-stops and paradox-machines, we had the god-machines, we had weapons capable of flaring superclusters into neverexistence, but we had beautiful things too.” He closes his eyes. “And they’re gone.”

“Why are they gone?” she asks again, trying not to let her voice shake and hating herself and him for failing.

His eyes open again, and it’s dizzying, the anger and the fear and the guilt so strong she can’t imagine it, and she can smell the sharp-edged taste of storm again.

“Because I killed them,” he says, and she flees.

_=limasyndrome=_

She brings him a broken wristcomp, the next day. He turns it over in his hands, quizzically.

“Fix it,” she hears herself saying. He raises an eyebrow.

“You want _me_ to fix this? You’ve got a working one, you must know how.”

“That’s none of your concern,” she snaps.

“I’ll need tools,” he says. “I’m not a miracle worker, you know.”

“Tell me what you need and I’ll bring it. That’s how it works.”

“That’s how it works,” he repeats, not mocking, just considering. “That’s how it works.”

_=limasyndrome=_

When he’s done with the wristcomp, she brings him a forty-fourth century supercomputer. It’s roughly the size of an average pillow.

She can tell he recognizes that it’s not from the twenty-first by the way he frowns, but he doesn’t say anything. Instead, he asks for several tools she can’t identify, but her supervisors bring them in, and he has the computer fixed in eight days.

_=limasyndrome=_

“This is a _vortex manipulator,_ ” he says, not taking it from where she placed it on the bed. “That’s time-travel technology. Sixtieth century time-travel technology, by the look of it. Where did you get it?”

“That isn’t your concern.”

“I can’t do that. I can’t give you time travel.”

“Believe me when I say it’s far too late for that,” she tells him, and he must believe her because three days later it’s fixed on the table when she comes in.

_=limasyndrome=_

“Tell me about the Time Lords.”

He snaps up. “What?”

“You claim they never left Gallifrey, never meddled in other timelines. Why did you leave?”

His eyes go green-flint hard. “No.”

“You will,” she says. “Why did you leave Gallifrey? What happened?”

“No,” he says again, straight and controlled

“Yes,” she tells him, and holds the silver device high in the air. And there it is again, a flinch, more extreme this time. It’s not his fault, really; Pavlovian conditioning is hard to fight, and though Time Lords might be able to control instincts, _he_ can’t. Not anymore.

“No,” he says, and then there’s the hiss and crack, and he screams.

“Why did you leave Gallifrey?” she asks him again.

“No!” he half-shouts, and then he starts to scream again.

“Why did you-“

“I will not-“

Snap. Hiss.

“Please-“

Snap. Hiss.

“Stop,” he gasps, sucking in air, eyes pleading. “Please, I’ll tell you-“

Snap. Hiss.

“ _Because I was scared!”_ he shrieks. “The Untempered Schism showed me all of Time and Space and it showed me my future and I couldn’t remember it but I was scared! I ran because I wanted to get away! Are you _happy?_ ”

“What is the Untempered Schism?”

He closes his eyes. “Hole in the fabric of spacetime, where Omega built the Eye of Harmony and opened the first black hole, direct route to the heart of the Vortex. At the age of eight – in Gallifreyan years, they’re longer than Earth – “

_=limasyndrome=_

She brings him more projects. He finishes them. They increase in complexity, until there’s problems mixed in that the Agency honestly can’t solve themselves.

Every tangle, every dilemma unravels under his thin fingers. He doesn’t even have to think about it.

At night, she asks him questions.

Time passes.

_=limasyndrome=_

He tries to escape once.

He makes through the fingerprints and dna-scanners and all the fancy equipment with absolutely no problem – they still don’t know how he did it, but they found him passed out, one door from the elevator. He won’t tell her about it, claims he physically can’t, a thing that’s impossible to describe in English. She suspects he’s lying. He has to be lying, but she can’t demand the truth out of him or he’ll recognize that she hasn’t had any idea if he’s lying since their fourth conversation. Maybe he already knows. Maybe he’s feeding her carefully calculated nonsense.

He’s punished, though, and that makes things a little better.

_=limasyndrome=_

“Who are you, Vivian?”

“I am the one in control,” she tells him. This is true.

“Is this the Time Agency, Vivian? Is that what the name means?”

“That’s none of your concern.”

His eyes widen, pleading for answers, for an opening in her defense.

“Why would you keep me in this time, if you have access to vortex manipulators? What does the Time Agency do, in this universe?”

“I ask the questions,” she says, and holds up the silver button. He snaps silent, but his eyes keep following her around the room.

_=limasyndrome=_

Has it really been a year? Ten years? She doesn’t know. He’s taken to singing while he works on the project she brings him – biology, forensic work, electronics, physics, translation work, he solves it all with glee. He says he knows five billion languages. She doesn’t believe it, but he does know every language they bring in.

Sometimes the songs he sings are in English, or in another language she can identify, Ancient Greek or seventeenth-century French or rural Cantonese. Mostly they aren’t. She doesn’t know which, if any, of the songs are in his mother tongue; he sings all of them equally, sometimes audibly switching languages in the middle of a song.

She thinks he might be going a little bit mad – or little more than he was already. _Unstable,_ he said, and she believes it.

He stops asking about Rose Tyler. When she’s mentioned, all he does is go alien and shut down.

_=limasyndrome=_

One day, things change.

She brings him an assignment, to create a disease of some kind, synthbiology the Agency scientists can’t manage. Apparently it’s for some kind of fail-safe switch, to get rid of all aliens on Earth, if the need arises. He’s halfway through the project when he suddenly stops –

Stumbles backward from the table, nearly falling over. He darts to a pinhole camera, more animated then she’s ever seen him before. “Vivian!” he shouts into the lens, desperate, angry. “Vivian!”

She comes, though she knows she shouldn’t, sharp and angry, finger on the shock button. He doesn’t flinch at the sight of it anymore, hasn’t for months now.

“Vivian,” he says, leaning forward as far as the chain will allow. “That’s a – I don’t want to do this one. Bring me a different one.”

“You do what we tell you to do,” she snarls, hating herself for coming at his call.

“No, it’s, it’s a killer. That thing they want me to design, it would kill everything inhuman on Earth.”

Something sparks dully at the back of her mind. “You’d be protected,” she offers. “The airlock wouldn’t let it through, and the air is sterilized here.”

“No, but that’s not the point, I don’t care about that,” he says (and he doesn’t, she realizes. Not a death wish; he honestly doesn’t care if he lives or dies. “It would be – it would be _genocide,_ Vivian. A hundred thousand breathing people – or, you know, non-breathing people, people with gills, that’s not the point – could die, just because some idiot drops a vial.”

“That’s the point,” she says, before she can stop herself.

“I won’t do it.”

“You _will.”_

“I will not.”

She presses the button.

_=limasyndrome=_

Her supervisors are angry at her. She’s taken away his lockpicks, put him in a jumpsuit, had the people drag all the furniture out of the Room (knocking him out first, so he doesn’t see it) making the chain barely long enough to reach the bathroom.

He won’t do it. He doesn’t answer her questions anymore, and even when he does the explanations are long and rambling and devolve into stories that he recites like poetry. Sometimes he slips into other languages. Nearly always the info’s useless.

_=limasyndrome=_

Night.

“How is a TARDIS built?” she asks him. He stares at her incredulously for half a moment and starts laughing, uncontrollable laughter that pours out of him without stopping for breath. He only stops when she shocks him, the laughter melting into the scream far too perfectly, going higher and more desperate until there are tears running down his face.

“I could tell you,” he says, later. “But I’d have to teach you Old High Gallifreyan first, and it wouldn’t help anyway.”

“Why?”

“TARDISes are grown, not built,” he tells her. “You’d need a chunk of TARDIS-coral, and a couple thousand years’ worth of sideways time, and a time-pool nursery to grow her in. There’s only one TARDIS left in the universe, one fragment off the Eye of Harmony, one piece of the first black hole. She’s the only thing that’s keeping the universe in existence, if you look at it a certain way. Or maybe the universe is the only thing keeping her in existence, it could be that one too.” He smiles. “It’s hard to tell sometimes.”

_=limasyndrome=_

“Vivian,” he says.

She snaps up. It’s the first word he’s said to her in two weeks.

“You said you were mind-wiped.”

“I’m surprised you remember it,” she says icily.

“I have a good memory,” he tells her, and smiles bitterly. “So you don’t remember working at this supposed Agency, do you? How much do you remember?”

“It’s none of your concern is what I remember.”

“Do you like this job, Vivian? Do you like feeding me, talking to me? I’m driving you mad, aren’t I, Vivian?”

“Shut. Up.”

“Vivian,” he says softly, “Do you ever wonder if you volunteered for this?”

She realizes she’s going to slap him, calmly, as if from very far away. So does he. And then his eyes widen, realization, terror, as her hand slips upwards –

“Vivian, no-“

Her hand touches his face. She doesn’t remember the rest of it. She remembers guilt and fear and grief and rage and pain, she remembers madness, she remembers a blonde girl she loves so much it tears her heart apart, she remembers orange skies and silver trees.

When she wakes up she’s crying, curled up, and he’s hovering over her, shouting “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t have my shields up, I didn’t mean to, I’m sorry, I’m _sorry,”_ over and over again, babbling –

She presses the button, watches him fall, presses it again, and again, and again, until he stops screaming, the hissing snap too loud in the silent room, until they come to take her away.

_=limasyndrome=_

She understands him now.

They offered to mind-wipe it out of her, but she refused, saying she didn't remember it anyway, not really. She lied, then.

They built a makeshift medbay in the vault, and even then she came every day, watching the monitors beep, watched the single heartbeat under his skin.

They tell her he heals faster than should be possible, that his body temperature, always cooler than human, has gone nearly below freezing, but it's not hurting him, seems to be some sort of coma-healing mechanism.

The nurses and doctors all stayed masked. She does not want him to see any face but hers.

She understands him, or thinks she does, and she despises him all the more for it.

What? Did you think she'd _like_ him now? She was in his _head._

She has seen all the things he has done.

_=limasyndrome=_

He's hanging from the wall chains, out of the hospital, when she comes in again. Ragged, broken, spidery-bright lightning scars twisting around his neck and up his cheeks.

He doesn't look at her, whispers a heartbroken, "I'm sorry."

She leaves the food and walks away.

_=limasyndrome=_

"Do it," she says. He shakes his head. "Do it." He stays silent, refuses to answer. "Obey me!" she shrieks, and he looks at her with sadness in his eyes.

_=limasyndrome=_

"Why are you still here?" he asks, one day.

"What?" she says, derailed.

"I thought you were gone for good, after..." He hesitates. It doesn't matter. They both know what he means.

"Thought you'd gotten rid of me?"

"It's not like that." He looks at her, so sincere it hurts. "It's never like that. I wouldn't do that to anyone. I stopped holding the shields up properly, left just enough so it wouldn't leak into the ambient field. Nobody touched me, so it didn't matter. I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

“Sorry saves no lives.”

“Please, Vivian Heartwood –“

They both realize what he said simultaneously. She marches up to him on those same black high-heels, and he doesn’t move, stays still and quiet as stone, but his eyes betray his fear.

“How do you know my name? I never told you my name.” She’s absolutely positive she introduced herself as Vivian and nothing else.

“You can slap me now,” he says, dull and dust-dark. “Shields are up.”

_“How do you know my name?”_

“A psychic shock like that doesn’t go just one way,” he whispers.

Her hand hovers in the air, wavers, but she can’t do it, the memory of skin touching skin too sharp behind her eyes. There’s a ragged moment there where she can’t breathe, and then she snaps the hand down.

“I stayed because I don’t want anyone else to have to deal with you,” she lies, and storms out.

_=limasyndrome=_

Time still passes, but stranger, angrier. They know each other now, and something’s changed in the balance of power; she’s slipping out of control.

One evening, she comes in faster than she really should, gives him no time to lock the chains, and shocks him for it. Just to be sure she still can. He screams, but it doesn’t feel like a victory.

It’s not that she doesn’t believe what she’s doing is right, or that he deserves it; she hates him, and everything she’s seen only convinces her more that he _needs_ to be, _deserves_ to be locked up. That’s established. That’s not the problem. It’s that she feels like she’d losing, like she’s the one trapped instead of the other way around. As if he’s gaining control.

But that’s the thing: he’s not. It hurt him just as much as her, maybe more. He was mad to begin with, but he’s gone madder, and it’s the painful kind of mad.

One day she comes in to ask him about the past people he took with him on trips through time, and he refuses to speak English; answers every question in something icy and sibilant, sounding increasingly desperate when she doesn’t understand him. Liquid streams of syllables pour out of his mouth, asking questions, not comprehending why she can’t understand him, almost childlike.

God, she hates him.

_=limasyndrome=_

The next day, she drags it in: a nearly featureless black box, engraved with whorls and lines, symbols they can't read. She'd bet he can, though. She wonders what it says.

"Is that your language?" she asks, razor-sharp, almost cheery. 

"No," he says. "No, that's Kosaii - from the ringworlds - where did you get that? What's it for?"

"Oh, we don't know, really," she tells him, smiling sweetly. "Not the faintest idea what it was originally supposed to do. It seems to be broken, though." He shakes his head, blinks, as if trying to clear his head of something. "Constantly exuding an irregular flow of various time particles - you know, chronons and so on."

"I noticed," he says, squinting at the box.

"Don't worry though, it's perfectly safe. The radiation doesn't affect people." She pauses. " _Or_ you. It just slides off into the Vortex, it seems. Harmless, really. Unless, of course you're overly time-sensitive," she smiles, "in which case the chronostatic vibrations might drive you a _teensy_ bit stark raving bonkers. Oh well."

She leaves.

A week later they set up the medbay again. He raves in languages nobody can translate, crying out for people with names like _Susan_ and _Koschei_ and always, always, _Rose_. When she asks him questions he babbles streams of soft icy syllables and stares straight through her.

_=limasyndrome=_

"Who were you calling out for?" she asks.

He won't look at her. "People I've lost."

"…There was a War, wasn't there?"

"The Last Great Time War."

"And you ended it."

"I had to." He's trying to convince himself as much as her. "It was tearing time apart. The entire universe was hell, every point in space and time was burning. Someone had to. The Nightmare Child. The Horde of Travesties. Things born of ripped time, horrible awful half-sentient abysses that ate holes in space itself. Someone had to." He closes his eyes. "Besides, it wasn't really me anyway. It was the real Doctor. The other one."

"And now they're all gone, and you walk the Earth unpunished."

He looks at her, honestly surprised, and giggles, a horrible manic sound.

"Not completely unpunished. I survived, didn't I?"

_=limasyndrome=_

Three days after that conversation she brings him in.

Not the xeno. It's strange - she hasn't thought of him as the xeno in years. He was always just - him.

No, she brings in Agent Five. 

He sniffs the air in the airlock. "Smells like ass in here," he announces, and inside the Room she hears the now-familiar sound of the xeno, or whatever she's calling him now, dragging himself and the four chains tying him to the wall upright.

His eyes are wider and more vulnerable than she's ever seen him, tracking Agent Five through the Room. She's never realized how pitiful he looks, even skinnier than when he first came in, hair (she's never cut it, but it doesn't seem to grow if he doesn't want it to) ragged and spiky, the network of scars around his neck sharp in the white light of the Room.

Agent Five leans in close, smiling his trademark knife-edge smile, charming as always. "So you're the consultant, hmm? Gorgeous here tells me you know me in another universe. S'that true?"

"Jack," says the xeno, backed against the wall, eyes darting back and forth like a frightened animal. "Jack, don't-"

Agent Five laughs. "So that's the name I gave you? Which one? Jack Sky, Jack Crowley, Jack - what was the other one?"

"Harkness," whispers the xeno. "Jack Harkness."

"Oh, so you met me in me conman years," the Agent purrs. "I was quite a rogue in my youth, hmm?" And then he grabs the xeno's hand. 

The xeno recoils, trying to pull away, desperate, but neither of them start screaming - she guessed right, he wouldn't let anybody else into his head. "No, you'll - "

"Oh, come on," smiles the Agent. "You knew me over there, how is it different?"

"You're not Jack Harkness!" 

"No, I'm really not." The Agent grins and kisses him, casually, uncaringly.

Half a second, and the xeno pushes him away with strength he shouldn’t have, panting, as scared as she’s ever seen him. He looks at her. “Why are you doing this?” he gasps, pleading. “Why would you-“

Agent Five grins again, leans against the wall.

“I thought you’d enjoy meeting an old friend,” she answers.

“He’s not-“

“I’d say,” she muses, “He’s about as much your Jack Harkness as you’re the Doctor. So really, it’s only fair.” She leans in close. “Why don’t you tell him about all the adventures you had together? So you’re both in the know. So to speak.” She twirls the shock button on her finger.

The xeno shakes his head.

“How did you meet Jack Harkness?” she says, sweet as cyanide, the threat clear.

He casts a desperate glance toward Agent Five. “London-,” he manages. “In the Blitz. He was running a – a self-cleaner – a Chula medical ship he passed off as valuable.”

“Oh, that one,” laughs the Agent. “I remember that. That was with the gas masks, yeah? Ugly stuff. Went back and dropped a cleanser on it eventually.”

“You can’t – all of them would have died! Everyone within –“

“Oh, yeah, but it was the Blitz. Nobody noticed a slightly bigger bomb landing on an old hospital.” He shrugged. “Well, some people did, I guess. Didn’t really matter though.”

“Everybody lived,” whispers the xeno, looking at something they can’t see again. “I don’t-“

“What else did you do?” she asks, and smiles at him. “You travelled together, didn’t you?”

“…We saw… worlds. We – we fought the Daleks on the Gamestation together, and the Bad Wolf saved you - woke you up -“ He’s going ancient again, talking almost to himself, not listening.

“Who was the Bad Wolf?”

“She was…” he closes his eyes. “She was a free chronoform. Rose Tyler. She looked into the heart of the TARDIS and all the skies on all the worlds went gold. You – he – was dead, and she brought him back. Permanently.”

She hasn’t heard this part of the story before. “Permanently?”

“Look at the laws of the universe,” he croaks, “And you’ll see all the big ones, sure – inertia, entropy, artron vibrations. And then you’ll see a little footnote, and it’ll say, ‘Jack Harkness is alive.” He opens his eyes, glares at Agent Five. “But not _you._ Never you.”

The Agent glances at her, eyes asking: _is he telling the truth?_ She doesn’t know.

“I’m immortal?” asks the Agent, skeptical.

He doesn’t answer the question. “We fought the Master together, the Year that Never Was, kept him busy while Martha Jones walked the Earth – and he killed you, over and over, and you kept coming back – you were there at Davros’s battleship – you restarted Torchwood and made it something good and you saved so many people. You saved me. You saved the hand I – he – lost and forever later I, this me, grew out of it.” The xeno’s talking, desperate for some hint of recognition and not getting it. “Jack – you’re not – somewhere under the pretty face and all the deadliness you’re the Jack I knew, the Jack I remember. _Please.”_

Agent Five grins for the last time. “So you think I’m pretty?”

_=limasyndrome=_

"Obey me."

"No."

“I can _destroy_ you. I will destroy you.”

“What do you _want_?” he finally roars at her. “What do you want me to do?”

“Build that virus.”

“I’ve already committed genocide a million times over. I vaporized galaxies in the War. I won’t do it again.”

“You’ll be punished.”

“And that’s not even what you want. You want something else. What is it?” he asks, searching her face. “Is it control? Is it freedom? What do you _want_ from me?”

She does not answer.

_=limasyndrome=_

She doesn’t come for three days, after that. He resigns himself to it after the first missed meal, curls up into a ball with his face carefully hidden from all the cameras. She wonders what he’s thinking about. A decade locked up is nothing for a being that’s a thousand years old, or has a thousand years of memory. But still – the silence in the Room is nearly unbearable when there’s two of them in there. She can’t imagine what it’s like alone.

_=limasyndrome=_

“Obey me.”

He shakes his head.

“I’ll bring – what was her name. I’ll bring Donna Noble, this universe’s Donna Noble here and I’ll rip her apart in front of you.”

“No, you won’t.”

“You can’t stop me,” she snaps.

He looks at her with tired eyes. “Donna Noble was upgraded in the first wave of Cyberconversions. She’ll be smelted down by now, I expect. Maybe you could find the pieces.”

“..Then I’ll bring someone else. One of these aliens you’re so keen to save.”

“Do you really think that would make me do it?”

_“Yes.”_

“I’ve made this calculation before, Vivian. One life, two lives, ten, a hundred against a million living people. I’ve made it so many times, and every time I couldn’t decide things only got worse. I can make it one more time.”

_=limasyndrome=_

“Why do you cry when you dream?”

He looks up at her, startled. “I don’t -”

“I’ve seen the camera feeds. Your vital signs go straight to my wristcomp. Answer me.”

“I don’t cry when I dream,” he answers, simply. “I cry when I wake up.”

She cocks her head. “Do you have nightmares?”

“Wouldn’t you already know if I did?”

“We’ve established you can control your heartrate. Answer the question.”

He smiles. “I used to.”

“What does that mean?”

“Before the War.” He sighs. “The Time Lords acted stuffy and stupid, but we had some of the most vivid dreams in the universe. Something to do with time-sensitivity, I suppose, or living so damn long. And what with the Untempered Schism, sideways future, they were true as often as not.” He looks at her in that way he has. “I dreamed of fire and I dreamed of darkness and I dreamed of war.”

“And now?”

“I have human dreams now,” he tells her, smile turning bitter. “Even before this me happened, when I was still the Time Lord me. Something broke, in the Time War, and I left the future-dreams behind. I get fuzzy, cheerful things nowadays. And everybody I’ve ever missed is just sort of there and okay and fine. How they got there is indistinct because it doesn’t matter and the dead people all got better in some vague way.”

“Then why do you cry?”

“I told you,” he says, genuinely surprised she doesn’t understand yet. “I cry when I wake up.”

_=limasyndrome=_

She hates him. God, she hates him, and she’s repeating herself but there’s nothing else to say. She sees him, broken and skinny and scarred, but the storm-bright glint in his eyes is still there, and she hates him for it. She wants to make him cry. Make him bleed. Make him say something, so she can get those eyes out of her head.

_=limasyndrome=_

She kills a family of Alterans in front of him.

This time, she does not shout, does not scream, gives him no final demand, no ultimatium. She brings them in, chained together, mother and father and brooder holding their children with appendages like tentacles and something that’s very obviously fear on their doglike faces. She tells him what she’s going to do, clear and clean, in English, and ignores their terrified screams. She ignores him when he jumps up, ignores his clever words and cries and pleas. She cuts them open, one by one, and leaves them just barely in his reach.

She watches him through the cameras – watches him bind and bandage and do his utter, utter, best, whispering comforts in their language. He’s almost beautiful like this, still broken and skinny, tears streaming down his face, trying so hard and failing.

He knows he can’t save all of them, and watching him try to decide as time and blood runs out is like the sharp smell of storm and honey on her tongue. Eventually he focuses on the smallest, the least injured – asks for its name, croons it over and over again as its parents die on the cold white floor.

It slips away just after dawn on the world above, and he sits there, covered in blue blood from head to toe, his matted hair coated in it, and begins to scream.

He falls silent half an hour later when his voice gives out for good, and does not move. There is an anger in his eyes she hasn’t seen before, something more than wanting freedom or revenge.

He’s given up.

_=limasyndrome=_

He goes silent. Shuts down completely, in a way she’s never seen before. When she brings him food, he doesn’t even look at her, just keeps staring into the distance with green eyes that have lost all their depth, all their darkness, turned empty and quiet and dead.

And then - in the middle of the next night - he stops breathing. 

Suddenly. Inexplicably. Inhales, pauses, and does not exhale again, heartbeat slowing, not moving. The wristcomp wakes her up, wailing a klaxon alarm, and she jumps out of bed, barefoot, barrels through all the security measures, wild unfettered hair trailing behind her.

He’s lying on the floor, spread-eagled, staring up at the ceiling. The wristcomp tells her he hasn’t taken a breath in six minutes and twenty-seven seconds. He’s conscious, she thinks. He must be. It’s another alien trick of his and that’s it, the awful lying planet-destroying scum.

“Wake up!” she shouts in his face. He doesn’t react. His eyes don’t focus. “Wake _up!_ ” she shrieks, “You bastard, you did this on purpose, you, you _thing._ ” She kicks him in the side with all the strength she can muster; he curls up and takes it. She kicks at him again, but he’s not breathing, he’s not moving. She wonders wildly if this is some sort of insane attempt at suicide – it must be easy, if you can control breathing and heartrate to that degree. “ _Wake UP!_ ” she screams, realizes she might be crying, keeps kicking at him, wiping wild hair out of her eyes. The wristcomp beeps, counting –seven minutes, seven minutes and one second. How long can he keep this up?

“Doctor,” she cries, “You _bastard,_ wake up.”

And then he moves.

She steps back, not daring to hope.

He half-sits up, gasps, and starts to cough, taking great ragged breaths in between. And then he begins to laugh – that same insane laugh she’s heard once before, a laugh that doesn’t _stop._ Suddenly she realizes she’s still in her nightgown, still barefoot on the Room floor, and she takes another step back, almost afraid.

“You called me Doctor,” he hiccups, the breath monitor on her wristcomp finally heading back into normality. “You called me Doctor.”

He’s still laughing when she runs.

_=limasyndrome=_

“Hello, Vivian.”

Cold. Recognition. Confusion. (stars-like-fire-and-?) Recognition? Waking up – muffled-like-glass – Vivian? Vivian. Pull. Think. _Think_. 

Where is she? Her head is thick and musty, her tongue swollen and dry in her mouth. She opens her eyes, blinking slowly, fuzzy shapes floating in her vision. _What…?_

“It’s me.” There’s something strange about the familiar voice. Something like a distortion, a reverberating buzz, even though she can hear it clear as glass. Her head is on the floor, she realizes; the fuzzy shape is a pair of bare feet. Something’s gone wrong – she can tell; she feels strange, like she’s looking at the world through broken glass. Her thoughts come slow, like honey. Something is holding her hand.

She tries to sit up. She can’t sit up.

She tries again, more desperately, but she can’t, physically cannot make her limbs move. She tries to kick out, to flail and struggles, but she’s trapped and gagged by invisible restraints, and her screams stay locked in her throat. She is locked inside her own head, her body ignoring anything and everything she tells it. (Confusion. Despair? Fear – Think. Analyze.) She winds her eyes upwards, trying to see what’s happening, but all she can see is too-familiar hospital white.

And then he bends down to look at her.

There is still blood crusted in his hair, dried dark-blue trails running down the side of his face and onto the wireframe shock scars. He’s not wearing the shock collar, she realizes numbly, but her scream is still trapped under her tongue.

He cocks his head at her. It is a motion without an ounce of humanity in it.

“Don’t worry, you aren’t paralyzed,” he says, and suddenly she realizes what’s wrong about the voice. A double timbre, a half-echo – the spoken words ever so slightly behind the words appearing in her head.

He’s holding her hand.

“Mmmph,” she manages. He looks at her with green eyes, Donna Noble’s eyes, but they’re not human anymore. They aren’t deep and dark and ancient either – that at least is familiar, however unsettling it is. They’re flat and featureless and indescribably, horribly alien.

“You know,” he says, muses, ignoring her. “People used to talk to me about higher races a lot.”

He looks up, somewhere she can’t see, then back at her. The movement is too fast, too exact, almost birdlike.

“They’d say things like ‘Come away from those primitives, and we can conquer this ignorant world together!’ They’d try to get me to join them. The thing I used to tell them – if I ever listened to them, they’d be in just as much trouble as the so-called primitives.”

He smiles at her. It’s not bitter, or angry. It’s not kind either. There is no humor in it.

“And I was right. I never really understood them, never listened. You made me listen.”

She twists inside her own mind, trying to remember everything she ever read about telepathy and two-way roads, throws herself at the stuffy darkness sitting in her head –

-and he _catches_ her, holding her mind like toy or a trinket, and she squirms, terrified, in his grasp. It’s not painful, it’s barely even uncomfortable, but she knows with a terrifying certainty that all he has to do is squeeze, and she’d be gone forever.

He keeps talking. “You taught me, Vivian Heartwood. I’m not really human at all, am I? I thought I was – a single heart, green eyes, it made sense to me. I’d be a human – a strange human, but a human, and I’d love Rose and she’d love me back and that was all I ever wanted.”

He pauses. “I don’t remember what she looks like. Isn’t that strange? Nine hundred years’ worth of memories I can keep just fine, but I can’t think of her face. I know I loved her, though. I still love her. You took that away from me.”

He bends in closer, face inches from hers. “But now I know what I am, Vivian Heartwood. I’m the last remnant of the Higher Races in this universe. The only remnant. I’m the only person left who can taste Time and watch Her dance. Timespace is mine, and She will _obey_ me.”

 _Are you going to kill me?_ she tries to say, and fails, breath hissing in and out of her lungs evenly.

“No. I’m going to leave you here. The mind-lock will deteriorate in a few hours, with no ill effects. Well.” He smiles. “If I did it right. My training was a long time ago. Do you understand?” he says, throwing the words back in her face with something like glee.

_You can’t get out. You’re mad._

“Oh, Vivian, Vivian, Vivian. Weren’t you listening? Time and Space, Vivian. It’s all mine.”

He grins a last alien grin at her and stands up. Even the way he moves has lost any semblance of humanity, some mask thrown away. He seems more natural, this way. The Time Lord, the half-god, in his element; always cold, always above. It’s like looking off a cliff face to the stars below, like the eye of the lightning storm: beauty wild and terrible.

“Oh, and mad? Well, maybe. Unstable, remember? I killed all the Daleks once. For the third time, I think. Or was it the fourth?”

_I hate you._

“You know what your failing was, Vivian?” he asks her. “Your curse, your great miscalculation, your tragic flaw? No?” He pauses, looks at her. There’s a moment like ice, like pain – waiting for words that don’t come. “You could never hate me as much as I hate myself.”

_Doctor-_

“Shh,” he hums, and _stops_ her, cuts the sentence off clean and brutal and cold. Snaps something deep inside, leaving her scrambling to form words, to breathe, to think at all.

Considers.

“No,” he says. “No, I really don’t think so. Not anymore.”

And then

(he walks)

away

_=limasyndrome=_

_=limasyndrome=_

_=hewalksaway,shethinks,andshedoesnotmustnotcry=_

_=heneverlooksback=_

_(Silence.)_

_(sorry - Vivan Heartwood, I - limasyndrome - pain)_

_=limasyndrome=_

(Time passes. Even for her. Even now. It does.)

_=limasyndrome=_

It’s been three months.

They let her out of the mental ward eventually, after she learned to hear words in the storm of syllables again. As soon as they allowed her through the glass, she ran, eyes dark, and she has not stopped now. She understands,now, what he meant when he talked about a spring at the base of his spine, a monster snapping at his heels. It drove him across the universe a million times over. She wonders what it’ll do to her.

The Agency is dead, or close to it, the entire upper echelon gone, command structure collapsing behind it. She’s started calling it the Battle of the Wake, in her head, though she’d never admit it; the moment when the demigod realized what he was, and took up his inheritance. She does not know the number of casualties, but she saw the videos; he killed them without care or regret, men and women he knew were evil, and he did not look back. (And Agent Five was among the dead, neck snapped clean and cold, smile frozen on his face -)

Three months, and she still has trouble forming thoughts in sentences and paragraphs, and sometimes words will desert her in the middle of a conversation, sudden and sharp. Leaving her deserted, speechless, listening to the babble of sounds around her but gaining no meaning from it.

She’s looked up Lima syndrome. It’s a proposed converse to Stockholm syndrome – where the captor falls in love with the captive, instead of the other way around. She doesn’t know what he meant by it. She doesn’t know why he left those words so deeply imprinted in her mind that they stay with her even when she can’t understand anything else. She doesn’t think she was in love with him, if that’s what he’s implying.

Maybe he doesn’t know what love is anymore. She doubts it. It’s a message for her, but she can’t figure out, and the words haunt her every second of every day.

She has stopped reading the news. Maybe he has found his Rose. Maybe he’s halfway across the galaxy by now. Maybe he’s going to take over the world. Maybe he’s going to find her and rip her apart, slowly, taking his Time. Maybe he really was just mad, and some kind of galactic Agency has locked him up for his crimes. Maybe _she’s_ just mad, and he never existed at all.

At night, she thinks about legends. Stories of ice-cold, stone-old Fair Folk, beauty strange and terrible. Their hills are bigger on the inside, and reform, leading you in circles constantly. Their food will trap you, at their mercy. They are bound by word; they keep their promises, to the letter and nothing more. Cold iron traps them, and cold iron will bind you to their will; but if ever they should escape -

Maybe – and this is by far the worst scenario, ripping at her from the inside out – maybe she’ll never see him again. Never know what happened. Maybe he’ll just fall out of the world, passed on to wherever chronogods go, leaving her alone – running – leaving her alone with fear and hate and uncertainity and grief.

And the memory of utterly alien eyes.


End file.
